Russia has given up on outright fake news for meddling in midterms, experts say — but is using more subtle techniques instead

Sinéad Baker, provided by

Published
7:20 am CST, Tuesday, November 6, 2018

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Russia is stepping away from using fake news and has adopted different tactics to bait and divide Americans and influence elections, experts say.

The apparent playbook for interfering in the midterm elections is harder for people and social media companies to detect, experts told Reuters.

New tricks include boosting existing partisan memes from both political extremes, and promoting divisive posts online which originate from Americans.

Experts say that this strategy relies less on pure fiction, and makes it much more difficult to detect.

Russians believed to be connected to the government are still interfering in the US midterm elections, experts say — but have moved on crude tactics like fake news to new, more subtle efforts to bait and divide Americans.

Government investigators, academics and security firms believe that Russia is spreading divisive content online — including memes that come from the far left and right — with the aim of promoting extreme ideas and dividing Americans, Reuters reported.

This strategy is hard to detect, and allows them to avoid scrutiny from the government and big social media companies, the experts said. It complicates progress made by ordinary people and tech giants like Facebook, who are far more aware of the problem than they used to be.

But researchers told Reuters that Russia's tactics have changed in response, and now relies less on pure fiction.

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The new tactics involve picking up on trending topics, like Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court or the Occupy Democrats protests, to promote extreme opinions, according to security company New Knowledge.

The company compiled a list of suspected Russian accounts on Facebook and Twitter that were similar to those suspended after the 2016 campaign.

Some efforts have been noticed by news outlets. The Daily Best reported on Friday that 40,000 out of 250,000 tweets about a "Blexit" — a call for African-Americans to leave the Democratic party — were from Twitter handles that had previously participated in Russian disinformation campaigns.